Powerpoint and Powerpoint

Readers are reminded that this blog is not always RantWoman at her best. RantWoman hopes SOMETIMES it provides coping tips for other blind people and entertainment for many others. Sometimes RantWoman just needs to vent and does not mean to cast aspersions on able public servants even when RantWoman gripes about accessibility. See if no one ever griped, aaccessibility would never happen and even when time reflects great strides forward and much learning how to do, there is plenty of room for learning how to do better.

Consider the general state of the world and  a pretty outrageous Grab the Blind Person and Bless them moment RantWoman is still digesting in her faith community (as in kinder, gentler but in context DANG IT still a Grab the Blind Person and Bless Them moment, oh and probably about average in the #disabilityinchurch pantheon. Sigh)

Anyway RantWoman's basket of opportunities for spiritual perfection and maintenance of equanimity was already overflowing. What should arrive but a Death By Powerpoint moment to top things off!

RantWoman is working with TWO Powerpoint presentations. The first one was at the quarterly Pedestrian Accessibility Advisory Board. RantWoman did not think to request the Powerpoint in advance. RantWoman already got more than enough to think about without more in-depth interaction with the Powerpoint. RantWoman is unclear whether she will want to refer to the Powerpoint again and might be happy just being able to find it with a calendar for the event.

Scratch that. RantWoman has tactile graphics software to play with and MIGHT decide whether any of the maps would make tolerable tactile graphics at the scale of the paper available. Play around? Probably not given RantWoman's schedule.

Next quarter RantWoman will remember to request the Powerpoint in advance. Plus iv everyone is lucky the crack and able group of disability community worthies assembled today can take another crack at the RantWoman experience mentioned next.

Tomorrow is the monthly meeting of the Citizens Telecommunications Advisory Board. RantWoman received a link for the impending Powerpoint through Office 365. Just for grins RantWoman tried to open it on her phone. The link wanted to send rantWoman a verification code. Duly requested and received in separate email from the link. so RantWoman would have liked either a link back to the input screen from the code email or a path to enter the code from the original email. RantWoman found neither and opted to head for a Windows machine.

(Note to self: RantWoman still needs to figure something out about file management on Chromie the Chromebook. One of these days. Meanwhile, Chromie with magnification and no screen reading makes an awesome Twitter platform and today RantWoman even achieved threading.)

Next on the path to spiritual perfection in the realm of Windows details: matters of headphones and JAWS on a computer at the Friendly neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing operating in demo mode, probably because an authorization code got clobbered while updating something else. Whine. And NO, RantWoman does NOT want all the pieces of info needed to enter the code herself. RantWoman just wants it to work because she has other things to do.

But at last RantWoman had a second verification code for Office 365. The code was entered. The document opened with instructions from JAWS to press ctrl semicolon for a more accessible version. "More accessible" mainly seemed to mean outline with the word picture and no picture. Boring. RantWoman found the link to download the presentation and took her chances with Powerpoint. No descriptions on the pictures. Some kind of text in graphics thing on the bottom of one slide. RantWoman probably has enough info for now anyway.